Locked and Loaded (22 page)

“Meanwhile, we can get a DELTA team up there in Toronto to—”

“Wait, wait, wait!” Sage said waving her arms and cutting off the colonel mid-sentence. “Please forgive me, sir, but it’s coming together in my head!” She walked back and forth quickly. “Guzman knew Roberto was betraying him by doing a deal with Assad behind his back—long before he found out about me. He said so in that shack. Guzman was toying with Roberto. It was even Guzman’s men that swept the red Mercedes to get video of me calling in for support from my DEA team. Roberto wouldn’t have enough juice to broker an arms deal for Assad … he got
played
by the old men! Guzman also said something about Ash Wednesday, which sounds really strange. It was out of context, like the old fox knew something else Roberto didn’t.”

Sage walked back and forth in front of the group. “Any arms transactions coming from Uzbekistan on a freighter—that’s gotta be your boy Dimitri, Colonel. He can put a nice Anglo name on it, but of course Dimitri would want his money wired to Canada and then to a Swiss or Cayman account. If it went to Canada first, that transfer wouldn’t be an immediate red flag in the casino’s system. Then coming out of an international businessman’s account in Canada to anywhere doesn’t seem so suspicious. Also, if I wanted to move something small and radioactive, I’d bring it on a train!”

“Damn, Wagner. That’s so obvious, now that you say it.” Hank rubbed his palms down his face. “During Mardi Gras, it’s impossible to move around New Orleans by car, right. Airports have heightened security, and by boat is too slow. But if I wanted to get something real bad out of this country, I’d ride the rails all the way to Houston and take a cruise to Mexico.”

“That’s just the thing,” Anthony said to Hank Wilson. “These guys aren’t necessarily interested in getting a pound of bomb-making materials
out
of the United States. That’s just where they’d want them to be. They had plans for physically moving the conventional weapons—which we interrupted.”

Sage stared at him now. “Washington, DC.” She covered her mouth for a moment as the room fell quiet. “If you had an old buddy who had offices and did lunch with congressmen and senators, wouldn’t you visit him in DC and tell him that DC might not be the place to be on All Saints Day … like the day after Mardi Gras? A calendar date that might also have significance to fundamentalist extremists?”

“
Ash
Wednesday,” Anthony said and closed his eyes. “Damn.”

“And if you knew his young protégé had scratched your money itch,” Sage pressed on, “might you not encourage your old friend to go visit New Orleans where you knew it would be safe … a place where he could also take back the business that was stolen after that errant protégé was duly punished? This keeps an old balance of power, an old friendship intact, while Andropov gets to sell weapons to Al Qaeda.”

“And at a technology fair in Boston, it would be easy to pick up a strange contraption and get on the train with it headed to DC,” Colonel Mitchell said. “I want every unit we have stateside combing trains from Boston to DC.” He looked at Central Intelligence wild-eyed. “Shut down the goddamned northeast corridor rail system if you have to!”

“But, sir,” Anthony interjected. “While I agree the threat has a very high probability of moving on the rail system, Aalam Bashir is not about to blow himself up. Top members of the terror cells leave that to peasants. We need to get images from Central Intelligence to track who Aalam Bashir met with while he was potentially in Boston.”

“We can scan for him,” one of the intelligence staffers said. “We’ll start with high probability border crossing areas … Since we have Toronto as one of them, let’s see if we can place him at the conference under a different name—or back into finding him by using Andropov’s photo as a locator.”

“Good, make it so,” the colonel said, still focused on Anthony. “So, Captain, talk to us. What’s your hunch from there?”

“During Mardi Gras, all transportation hubs are a madhouse.” Anthony went to the map on the whiteboard and drew a line with his finger. “If I were a terrorist who wasn’t going to blow myself up, I’d hand off my package in a train station—I’d send my suicide bomber to DC from Boston, which is only a six-and-a-half-hour run … but I’d go from Boston to New Orleans by rail myself to take advantage of being able to board with the cover of a technology conference and debark where it was chaotic. My face would be more recognizable than some unknown person I’d talked into the twenty-one virgins deal.”

Pausing to think for a moment, Anthony rubbed the nape of his neck and spoke with a frown. “So I’d need the extra cover of a crowd and I’d go to meet my men with the money, while some poor sucker nuked DC. The trigger to send Charles Wallace his cash is if that nuke actually works and detonates—not just having obtained some product from the old Soviet Republic that may or may not be worth squat. For that much money for a pound of product, I’d need to see or read about a mushroom cloud. The call Assad and his men are waiting on is to connect with Aalam Bashir in the New Orleans train station and to bring the cash … on a day when it’s virtually impossible for train authorities to spot-check people due to overwhelming crowds.”

“When Bashir calls his men here in New Orleans, we can answer … and we can maybe stall, claiming traffic problems,” Sage said, sounding unsure. “But they should already have his train schedule. They should already be there in the station to meet him.”

“If Aalam was going to get here tonight from Boston, he’d have to have gotten on a train yesterday morning at eight fifteen
A.M.
,” an intelligence staffer said. “That would put him in New Orleans at seven thirty-eight
P.M.
tonight.”

Everyone looked at their watches.

Sage looked at Anthony. “That’s less than a half hour from now.”

CHAPTER 17

Sage jogged next to an intelligence agent who handed her a large shoulder purse filled with a gun, cell phone, lipstick, and a compact. By the time she debarked from the chopper, she would have to look like a regular civilian, not someone who’d been in a firefight. The female agent had given her a new sweater by simply stripping off her own and trading right there in the situation room, and they’d gotten the dirt off her face while Anthony quickly recorded key words and phrases.

All agreed that a military presence in the train station might spook Bashir and they stood a chance of either losing him or having him tell his man in DC to detonate immediately. But a couple coming to meet family for the Big Easy festivities wouldn’t gain notice. This wasn’t about a show of force, but finesse—her ballgame.

They’d have to apprehend this rat bastard in the middle of hundreds of innocent civilians, so it wasn’t about storming the train station or having a huge shoot-out. They’d have to take Bashir down nice and easy. But first they’d have to get there on time.

Their chopper set down in the US Post Office lot over on Loyola and Girod, but that meant a two-block run past Julia Street to Howard Avenue. The prayer was that Bashir didn’t do what most folks did, call a few minutes before the train entered the station to give the person waiting the heads-up to be there. But if he did, they were ready. Intelligence had rigged Anthony’s cell to bounce the signal to them, his response would go through their voice synthesizer, then to the caller. It was the only way to get ambient train station sound—but if Bashir called while they were in the chopper, their plan was cooked.

As soon as they debarked, they began running. DEA would support with agents in plainclothes looking like holiday revelers, DELTA units would be hidden and guarding the perimeter, but she and Anthony had to flush and apprehend the target.

She grabbed his hand as they entered the train station and squeezed hard. “Slow down and smile. You look tense, like you’re hunting somebody.”

He nodded, slowing his breathing by inhaling deeply through his nose. “What if I’m wrong? What if this was all speculation and something really bad is moving on a ship or a cargo—”

She kissed him hard and then backed off.

“What was that for?” he said quietly.

“You’re not wrong and you need a reason to be breathing hard.” She smiled at him and glanced over his shoulder. “The train is dumping passengers. You need to look really casual. We’ll know in a minute if our theory is wrong.”

He kissed her hard.

“What was that for?” she said, smiling.

“For not dying on me, Sage Wagner.”

But she didn’t have time to respond. From her peripheral vision she saw a man that closely matched Bashir’s description melt into the throng and press a cell phone to his ear. When Anthony’s phone sounded, they parted. She headed for Bashir, Anthony moved through the crowd to stay on the flush side of the trap.

“
Assalamu Alaikum,
” Anthony said, as Sage pushed through the crowd.

Moving like an NFL linebacker, Sage put her shoulder down, barely excusing herself as she pushed through to Bashir and then hugged him.

“Uncle! You made it,” she shrieked loud enough for Anthony as well as Intelligence to hear her through the phone.

“Unhand me, Miss!” Bashir shouted, and then cursed as he dropped the cell phone.

Pretending to be clueless, she acted like she was trying to retrieve it and kicked it away under an oblivious human throng.

“I’ll get it, Uncle,” she said, holding his arm. “Where’s Auntie? How was the train ride, long I bet?”

Bashir pushed her away with both hands. “I do not know who you are, you crazy person! You have mistaken me, I assure you!”

Cold steel met the base of Bashir’s skull as civilians suddenly screamed.

“No, we’re not mistaken,” Anthony said in a low, threatening tone. “And the only reason you’re still alive is because these good people don’t need to see your head blown off.”

EPILOGUE

Six Weeks Later … Chicago, Illinois …

Six weeks was no time and yet a long time for a man to contemplate his entire future. If DELTA hadn’t been able to identify and take down Bashir’s hand-off man when the train stopped in New York en route to DC, there might not have been a future for millions of innocent people. And yet, having Sage in his arms made him know how much he’d been living like a man who had no future, only a painful past, only a hard present, without anything to look forward to.

She was what he looked forward to … and it took six weeks of bureaucracy and After Action Report paperwork on both her side and his to get free for a few weeks. Plus there was his promotion and hers. It was the hardest six weeks he’d ever had to endure … waiting for her, and now she was doing her woman thing—freshening up. Whatever that meant. Making him wait a few more excruciating minutes until she came back into the bedroom.

But what she’d never understand as a woman was this—he would have loved her right there in an airport bathroom or out behind the burning shack in the Ninth Ward, for all he cared. But she cared, so it mattered to him. He just wanted to be with her and to never be without her again.

She’d called him her hero when the madness was all over, but didn’t she know every so-called hero needed a national anthem? That’s what she was for him, that one intangible thing that made a man believe in something greater than himself, made him salute, made him stand up with his hand over his heart and pledge his allegiance to it … to her. Something … someone worth dying for, if necessary.

The soft R&B playing on his docked iPod had been selected just for her; the song masters crooned the truth of how he felt so much more eloquently than he could have ever delivered it. And the truth was, he didn’t want to be sitting on the edge of the bed in the W hotel waiting for her—he wanted to be in their home. Somewhere permanent.

As he looked at the bathroom door, waiting for it to open, waiting for an angel to appear from behind it, he knew he’d made the right decision. He’d kept his family’s home in Bronzeville, renting it out … hell, he was always on the go. Now it was worth a mint. He’d banked the insurance payments from his father’s, brother’s, and finally his mother’s passing. All of it eventually rolled down to him and he’d bought properties in Hyde Park way back when.

But for some odd reason, on their first time back together and her first visit to Chicago, he wanted to not only show Sage the tourist attractions, but also where he’d played blacktop basketball, gone to school … wanted her to see the roots he had or maybe hold his hand as he rediscovered them for himself. Maybe a little of both.

Nostalgia claimed him as he waited for her. He’d lived like a nomad and didn’t use much of his salary, never thinking he’d live this long, just socked it away. If she wanted to build a home … yeah, he could do that. If she wanted a building for a rec center to give kids alternatives and a positive place to be, yeah, he could fight the war on drugs at home with her—could fight it by turning around one kid at a time. She just had to say the word.

Or he could stay in the military and advance his career in noncombat positions, if he elected to, after this last tour of duty put him on the map, or as an officer he could retire at will with thirty days’ notice. But she didn’t have to go back to what had almost crushed her soul. The choice was hers, he’d just facilitate that decision.

She’d made him think about all of that with her smile and her laughter over the phone. Had made the bottom drop out of his stomach when he saw her again in the airport for the first time. Made him wish he could breach civilian airspace and fly a chopper from O’Hare to the W, instead of driving an hour into town with her hand resting on his knee giving him wood.

He’d been daydreaming so hard that when the bathroom door suddenly opened, it startled him enough to make him stand. She laughed and shook her head.

“Isn’t this how we began, Major?” She walked over to him slowly and fit her body against his. “Me catching you unawares?”